


Mapmaker

by zambla



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - World War II, Cartography, Colonialism, Egypt, Geography, Imagery intelligence, M/M, Pilots, RAF - Freeform, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 17:50:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5215055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus J Lupin is a geographer working for the RAF, stationed in Cairo, Egypt, under British control. He works in map intelligence, analyzing the precise positions of Nazi troops and airbases, updating geographic data from reconnaissance missions. Cairo teems with squadrons and platoons—men from all parts of the Empire and beyond. Remus wanders its streets alone, until he meets a pilot by the name of Sirius Black.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mapmaker

**Author's Note:**

> Written originally for the 2015 R/S Games. Team Moon! Minor edits since.

 

 

  
  
  
All the brave young men  
They're waiting now to see a signal  
Which some killer will be lighting for pay.  
  
-“The Old Revolution,” Leonard Cohen.  
  
  
  
  
  
I. **1943**  
  
Mornings begin with the _muezzin_ at the Red Mosque calling from his high tower, his melodious tenor breaking through the city’s lifting heat to its silently gathering faithfuls, not unlike the Red Warning of the air-raids filtered through the blackout dark. Other voices answer, quavers behind. Maybe it is no more than a chance echo—a chromatic coincidence—though every morning Remus Lupin wakes to the same alarm in that voice as in the mechanical whirr of the sirens. A dream of the _blitz_ , of smoke, of the infernal, eternal dark. He wakes to them both: the siren and the _adhan_ , counterpoints in an impossibly constructed fugue; predawn faith and midnight panic twinned like the doubled strings on a mandolin.  
  
Cairene dawn. No hint of rain or bombs. No shadow but the last night-hawks loping over the city. The sun shies above the minarets like a tardy lover in his window. A muffled jingle rings out from the first tram cars of the day. Shopkeepers begin their daily rituals of commerce, opening doors, setting out signs. People begin to fill the streets, filing through gates of muqarnas or iron or concrete, to prayer and work, conflowing and scattering in the garrulous sidewalks, still untouched by the anguished tremolo of a whistling bomb or the incendiary ghost of his dreams. A pigeon coos somewhere above his room. Where is the War, he wonders, as if he’s looking for it, waiting for it.  
  
His flat is in a section of apartments near Abdin Palace he’s rented for barely any money. It faces the sun for most of the day, and no material in Remus’s acquisitive powers seems to block it out during the long tortuous Egyptian afternoons. The rooms are unvisited and almost unfurnished except a bed and the pretense of a desk, now full of books and papers and unopened letters. Maps lie half-furled across the floor. Remus gets dressed in silence.  
  
There’s no point in looking—the War is here, was here, has always been here.  
  
—  
  
When he first arrived, everything about Cairo surprised him. Its heat surprised him. Its largeness surprised him. Its juxtaposition of decadence and squalor surprised him—first the squalor, then the decadence.  
  
The squalor was the easier to adjust to; the old city was filthy and full of begging orphans; refugees from across the Levant huddled in the poor quarters, living in lean-tos and shanties and subsisting on nothing. It was dusty. The heat neared unbearable. These became the new normality in the same way that War became the new peace. The trouble was that there was no baseline—you assumed it has always been like this: a long chain of privation linked to a long chain of primogeniture, from the Pharaohs to the Ptolemys to King Farouk, from the Pyramids to the Suez Canal Company, its conglomeration of interested parties, headquartered first in Paris then bought for a mere four million pounds by the Crown during one revolution or another. How could the poor survive in face of such power?  
  
But the decadence, Remus could not imagine. It was the days before Rommel, before Benghazi burned. The British resorted in boat-houses moored along the river, apathetic to the tone of War, or nightly attended parties on the Gezira, supplied with Champagne and wines from elaborately stocked cellars, ten years in reserve. Cruiseships drifted up and down the Nile. You could find aristocrats deposed from every country across eastern Europe, shopping for Milanese gowns or banqueting in the royal palaces still gloriously lit on blackout nights. Remus often wondered, as Marx had done a century before, how one was chained to the other—the blind beggar and his bejewelled king.  
  
—  
  
In England the heat—if ever there is heat—comes from your sweat glands, your armpits, your groin. You can hide your discomfort under your suit jacket. In Egypt it comes from the top of your head, relentlessly, from the sun all the way down to the ground. To be spared extreme discomfort you rolled up your shirtsleeve and pant leg from eleven in the morning until nine o’clock in the evening. There’s no one working in the afternoon anyway—you can go down for a swim in the Gezira (if you’re an officer) or else dive in the Nile. Remus works as long as he can before giving in around one o’clock, and slinks down to the riverside teashops, or else retreat to the somber quiet of the Egyptian Museum’s library.  
  
At night he goes out in the Old City; you can wander its labyrinthine streets then, unmolested by the heat if not the pickpockets. Men gathered at coffee houses to smoke _shisha_ and play backgammon. Remus found a cafe he likes at the edge of the market where he can drink sugared Arabic coffee and read _The Good Soldier Shvejk_ in the low light. The pimps and beggars no longer bother him. The hostess, Agnes, a plump Greek woman, would sit down next to him and offer to tasseograph his drying cup—an act of hospitality, she assures him, she would extend to no other European. “Look here,” she would point to some obscured feature in the coffee grounds, twirling the cup over the saucer like the eyepiece of a telescope, as if to focus its clairvoyantic powers, “it looks like a doggie, no?” But more often than not it looks like nothing at all.  
  
Remus goes back to his flat and thinks of the London he had left, the blackout, the rationing, the blitz. He turns on the radio for the items of news scattered among the propaganda—rebroadcasts of the BBC, the American stations, even Radio Beograd. Reports of London, of the British subjects, of the royal family. Rates of manufacture from munition factories and shipyards with women at their work lines. News of the European Jewry, no more than after notes on a long list of Nazi aggressions. Bravery of the British troops and songs from the home-front. Morale (high). English Spirit (unbreakable). Production (soaring). Thus concludes this evening’s broadcast with Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, jewel of the German heart.  
  
He writes to his mother, though not often, in terse letters that says almost nothing, a few words of love, a few pounds, a signature, to convey that he was alive—that she was alive.  
  
—  
  
It is in dreams that he most thinks of Sirius, which he does not do in waking life. There is no space in the waking, sober world for him to exercise it, his desire which has no outlet—the love which dares not. Must not. Sirius shows up in fragments. Mostly his hands. Smileless mouth pursed in thought. The flash-memory of fingers on him, at his neck, on his ear. An eagerness in them, foreign to his own apprehension—like an infectious ghost. Like an inhabitation of the spirit. He calls it a pang. A word reserved for hunger. Almost an onomatopoeia.  
  
—  
  
During April the city disappears in the _khamsin_. Cairo reveals itself through negatives, through its lapidary stasis. Its residents move in a shimmering mirage of sand. Napoleon’s men called it the cloud of blood. They cursed it and choked to death. The Arabs are more practical; they call it _fifty_. They’ve long ceased to think of it as a malice. For them the wind is simply a season, a wind of temporary occupation, fifty days of darkness and fifty nights of exile. When it leaves the smell of dust stains you for a month. The desert is in everything.  
  
—  
  
His job requires immense meticulosity and an intense visual imagination, able to disassemble space and cache its pieces in memory—to play jigsaw with the constituents of land and air and sea.  
  
In late 1940, when they were still fighting the Italians, the work was almost mystical—sitting in the reading room of the _Musée islamique_ trying to put scales to a sketch on a map, gleaning names from the half-remembered field notes of explorers and geographers. The names of winds. The names of caves. The unknown name of a wandering oasis. Groundwaters so clear and sweet they had the names of women, and were not given easily to strangers. The River, which had countless names in countless tongues, but only—according to the Bible—one true name, Sihor, the muddy, whose untraceable etymology was not corroborated by any Coptic or Arab writings. The desert seemed to him beyond mappable then—only a polysected Cartesian plane, a set of instructions, coordinates, and scale bars. Quadrants to be filled-in. Edges whose congruence he had to prove.  
  
But the War, even now, is still a ghost—a forethought. He stitches together photographs into their most likely configuration and can only imagine the shadow of War hanging over their cartographic features: dismembered roadways smoldering in the sand… scabrous outputs of bombers… villages pulverized. Oases poisoned. Airplanes falling like hot ash from the sky. It exists somewhere in the endless series of buildings reconstructed from the monochromatic aerial visionaires; a coastal villa near Benghazi fortified by the retreating Italians in a baffling move toward medieval counter-siege; bombing targets camouflaged into the craggy mountains that need to be extracted from the grainy texture; that single train track weaving along the serpentine coast, waiting for a golden moment of explosive guerrilla warfare.  
  
All death is predestined by his drafting pen.  
  
And the War is the vacuum, the aether of that foresight, the machinery that bridges the pen and the bomb, the pre- and post-op, the set of negations and parts missing, of villages strafed, of enemies exterminated, of people exiled. His maps are its scribe, its blueprint.  
  
  
  
  
  
II. **1940**  
  
They first met at a Christmas party thrown by Air Commodor Gauzman, in the ballroom of the Shepheard’s Hotel. How he was able to afford the entire ground floor was quite a mystery to everyone. War-pricing, perhaps. Egypt seemed to baffle the Anglican Christmas, accentuating its conservative posture into an eagerness for surrealism. Germanic traditions were practiced without a hint of irony: congregational hymns still in the languages of the enemy, wreaths of imported evergreen, plasticine Tannenbaums shagged with cotton-snow, all in the vast and rainless winter. In a literal sense it was nearer the truth: the Nativity no longer a protraction but more precisely located—as if somewhere in the eastern desert you might find an odd cluster of European figures garbed in the clothes of the Italian Renaissance, surrounded by adoring animals and painted clay-scenery, a lonesome star overhead and hoary snow-drift at their feet.  
  
The dance was dreary. “Mixed company,” they called it: a mixture of races, ranks, and sexes. Remus floated through the edges, drifting from one unwelcome conversant to another, feeling quite beside himself with boredom and unease. He ended up at the terrace, looking out onto the busy avenue. A particularly raucous party of soldiers broke into song just behind him. Horns blared as cabs wove among the traffic on _Sharia Kamil_. The night was unusually cool. The moon shone bright above the street.  
  
“Some party, eh?” A voice called from the next table, over the din. The man raised his glass. “Black. Sirius Black.”  
  
“Remus Lupin. How do you do.” They shook hands.  
  
“Which unit are you with?”  
  
“I’m with Intel—you?” Remus practically had to shout.  
  
“Squadron 14. I’ve heard of your lot though—are you with Signals or Imagery?”  
  
It was impossible to distinguish the last few words. “I’m sorry—with what?”  
  
“Signals,” the man repeated with surprisingly astute chironomy, motioning a sine-wave in the air. “Or maps.” He opened a mock-map with his hands.  
  
“Oh, yes. I’m with Imagery.”  
  
“Splendid,” The man—Black, was it?—seemed endlessly able to smile. He sat down at Remus's table. “I don’t actually know anyone here. Gauzman knew my father and he insisted. You know how it is, friends of family and so forth.”  
  
“They’re mostly from either Intel or Squadron 39.” Remus pointed to back towards the singing table. “Some boys from the Long Range Desert Group.”  
  
“Oh really? I hear they’re dashed good. Aren’t some of them Maori?”  
  
“Yeah, some. Top-notch boys—they supply a lot of the the field notes for our maps.”  
  
“You know out in the camps they call you lot the Short Range Shepheard’s Group, right?”  
  
Remus choked a bit on his gin and tonic. It was too funny. “Out of scorn, I gather.”  
  
“I’m not sure—out of boredom, I think. Though I suppose we’d all want to stay on your good sides.”  
  
It proved a strange coincidence, their meeting. Their conversation meandered—after the perfunctory exchange of origin stories, they quickly discovered that they had been at Cambridge at the same time, though in different colleges. Black correctly spotted Remus as a scholarship boy, and Remus did not require confirmation to see what kind of family Black was from—perhaps rich, perhaps political, but one with influence. They even knew some people in common; Remus had been briefly acquainted with James Potter, one of Black’s childhood friends, at which Black visibly perked up. He wanted to know how they had met—in the same way a sibling might, half-curious and half-protective, inquiring after the deeds of a little brother.  
  
“Nothing too exciting. We shared a seminary or two on modern history. We made friends and had some excellent discussions.”  
  
“I didn’t know he actually went to lectures—I assumed he was slacking off like the rest of us.” Black shared a conspiratorial grin and Remus could not help but smile back. “You know we joined up together, right after we went down from Cambridge. He’s a pilot at Uxbridge—No. 11. Quite the ace. Four confirmed kills at Battle of Britain.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sure—he always seemed like a daredevil.”  
  
“Devil is the word,” Black replied.  
  
One of the tables behind them began a drunken rendition of “Bless ‘em All,” though funnily enough, some had decided to substitute back the original “fuck” for “bless”. This caused quite a fuss with the neighboring tables; they accused the singers of being “out of line” and an officer had to intervene.  
  
“Well, here’s to that—fuck ‘em all.” Black raised his drink and they toasted, watching the commotion with bemusement. “I’m afraid I must get going. I’m actually due back out tomorrow at Ismailia. It was jolly good meeting you.”  
  
As Black got up to leave, fishing tips from his money clip and stubbing the last of his cigarette in the tray, Remus felt a frisson of recognition—or desire. What was it? A flash of silver from his dinner jacket cuff-links. Blue Cairene light. His fine features reflected in the dark paned glass, and the moon behind him: full, pale, and lusty, a rich jewel fastened over the Ezbekieh Gardens, over its palm fronds, its fountain-works, its oasal canals.  
  
—  
  
It was a week after that Remus started to dream of him. Vaguely, anxiously—then vividly, pornographically. At first he did not even realize they were sexual, the way they flitted across his mind, myopic and focusless, tinged with a strange _sfumato_. He would wake up and watch his own face in the mirror: slack, unguarded, a mixture of surprise and intrigue.  
  
—  
  
Remus saw Sirius again at La Taverne, tucked away at the edge of Cairo’s unofficial red light district. It was a cabaret that doubled as a clandestine homosexual club, favored by a few Free French sailors stationed in Alexandria with whom Remus was infrequently but intimately acquainted.  
  
He was drinking in a corner booth one night, alone, when someone flopped down unceremoniously across from him.  
  
“Hullo.” He had said, that distinctly public school voice melding into the music, its hint of refinement both familiar and jarring. He wore his pilot’s cap with a loose cotton shirt fitted in a quasi-Arabic style. His sunglasses hung on his breastpocket. The suddenness of seeing him left Remus feeling exposed. A flash of shock mixed with immediate desire. It was thrilling—and alarming—to be recognized, in such a place, at such a time. Words escaped him. “Oh—um—hi…”  
  
“Sirius Black. We met at Gauzman’s Christmas party.” Sirius was looking at him, quizzically. Remus was too embarrassed to say that of course he remembered him—how could he not? He had thought of him in the intervening weeks—fragments of his features, in blue relief against the kaleidoscopic light of Place de l’opera, and pictured them elsewhere, in repose, in movement, his shoulder, his neck, his hands. The brilliant eyes of either a prophet or a conman.  
  
“Ah, yes. You’re that friend of James Potter’s—how do you do.”  
  
“How was the rest of the party?”  
  
“I left quite soon after you did, actually.”  
  
“I suppose it was pretty late.”  
  
They looked at each other, perhaps longer than they might have needed. Sirius looked rather drunk.  
  
Remus broke the silence. “What brings you here?”  
  
Sirius raised his brows and smiled. “I was supposed to meet a bloke here but I’m afraid he’s blown me off.” There was a pause. The band’s trumpet soared into the opening of Josephine Baker’s solo number from _Zouzou_ and then quietened for the singer—a svelte black girl by the name of Ellie—who started to dance. The turning table fan whined next to their booth. _Ah, qui me rendra mon pays…_ The wooden stage creaked under the her sparkling voice. Sirius added, almost inaudibly, “I wonder if he’s not dead.”  
  
The girl was slowly swaying, forward and back on the lone-lit stage, like a canary on a swing. The piano rose wistfully with her voice. She had the haunted expression of someone looking into an unseen future. _C’est toi mon seul paradis…_ The music swelled. Her vibrato seemed to fill the room with its protractions of grief. Remus felt the icy air of war reach into the stale stillness of the room— _I wonder if he’s not dead_. Where was paradise for them, in the midst of this war? They who were born in exile—they who must search in the crevices of night, night after night?  
  
Sirius, too, was looking away, but his words hung in the air.  
  
They left together on a cab. Their driver cursed prodigiously in Arabic as they wove through the swollen streets full of stumbling soldiers and bored prostitutes. They sat apart in the backseat of the car out of discretion and unease. Horns blared. Remus studied Sirius, and wondered first at his sadness, then his beauty—the kind of _quattrocento_ face that articulated its zigzagging traverse through the bloodlines of European gentility and money—as the constellating streetlights flew across the tinted windows of the dusty taxi cab, first a moon, then stars, glowing white with desire.  
  
It was the tenderness, more than the immediacy, which surprised Remus when they first fucked. In the oppressive, lingering heat of his room, on the unmade bed. A tender blowjob. Coming by Sirius’s unfamiliar hand. The chemic smell of his chlorinated water after, and the long, late sunrise.  
  
—  
  
Remus found out later that he was not far off the mark in his estimations. Sirius was a quarter German—an heiress grandmother whose industrial fortune had saved a dwindling estate, only to be lost again in the Slump. He grew up as children of formerly moneyed families do—in the pretense of wealth. There was an absent father and a foreboding mother; a little brother of whom he would not say much; life in England seemed like an ache to him, a lead weight in his heart. _There’s no such thing as quarter-German_ —Sirius said once, post-coital, some months later, smoking his favorite Kyriazi Frères by the windowsill with his bare back turned to a glorious sunset—especially when you’re in a war with them. The bony lines of his body were flanked by the cerise oculus of the sun. Flakes of light fell between them. _No such thing as a quarter-German_. In the lengthening twilight Remus measured the meaning behind those words which seemed to inveigh against the darkness, against countryhoods, against the War.  
  
—  
  
Their assignations were mostly in the cover of night. Sirius would slip past the porter (Ali, most likely smoking _ma’assil_ in his small side room) who must have at some point wondered at their sporadic nocturnal meetings.  
  
“Have I ever told you about this game James and I used to play at Cambridge?”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“His parents made him spend a summer in the Swiss Alps. He was bored out of his skull and got quite fond of mountain-climbing. When he got back we went on excursions together at night. Naturally, being Cambridge, there was nothing else to climb. Eventually we made up this game to see who can climb onto the most inaccessible roof. James was frightfully good.”  
  
“What do you mean, climb? On the buildings?”  
  
“Just about.”  
  
“On the outsides?”  
  
“Oh yeah. It’s all about balance, you see. Shifting your centers of gravity in just the right way. Using your momentum. Once you get past the height, it’s quite fun.”  
  
“Did anyone catch you?”  
  
“Not really. We came close a couple times. I think the porter at Trinity suspected something—you know, that awful man with the mangy cat.”  
  
“Where would you climb?”  
  
“We climbed quite a lot of Trinity. We were working on St John’s chapel. I think we plotted a good route to take but we never had the time to actually do it—then May Week came and you couldn’t get a quiet night in college. But the view, Remus! It’s something else—seeing something so familiar from such a different vantage. We’ve tried looking but I’ve never found anyone else who’s done that sort of thing before.”  
  
Remus wanted to ask whether if they were afraid at all—of slipping, of falling. But he could not bring himself to. It seemed cowardly in light of their daring. He looked at Sirius. Was it the same incorrigible need that drove the explorers as what Sirius was talking about? The thrill of the unexplicated space, of a wild dimension at the end of the world or the heart of a city.  
  
—  
  
“In Medieval times, European mariners used to carry a Wind Rose—it’s that compass-looking device at the bottoms of old maps. It had eight winds—one for each cardinal and intercardinal direction. That’s how the directions were named—by the wind that came in through that way. Two of these winds are Arabic: _Sirocco_ , and _al Sharq_. It’s interesting how connected we used to be to the Middle-East.”  
  
“I didn’t know you were interested in this historical rot.”  
  
“It’s not so bad. Geography is not just a record, you see—who owned where or what. It sets the rules. It almost dictates who we are and what we do.” Remus paused. They were naked, eating some stale Egyptian bread Remus had in his room, leftover from a breakfast two days ago. “Does anyone know about us?”  
  
“About us—how do you mean—about my being queer?”  
  
“Well, yes. I suppose that’s what I mean.”  
  
“I think they must know. The wing commander knows—but he’s a family friend. It was all but open secret at school. They hadn’t said anything, if they do.”  
  
“How did you know I would say yes? At La Taverne, I mean.”  
  
“I didn’t.”  
  
“Aren’t you—weren’t you afraid of getting caught?”  
  
“Of course I was—but my dear Remus, there’s a war on. What else could I do?”  
  
  
  
  
  
III. **1941**  
  
1940 had ended as a disaster for the Italians, whose strategic preference for fortification over mobilization proved impossible in the shifting desert. But ultimately it was not the Italians they were fighting. It never was—it has always been Germany. Erwin Rommel landed in Tunis in early 1941 with the newly-formed Afrika Korps, and proceeded to trammel his way through all the British garrisons from the Gulf of Sirte to the Egyptian border.  
  
In those days Remus stayed up late at night over reports of German divisions flooding in from agents in Libya; the nearby offices were abuzz with conflicting intelligence—Signals were reporting estimates from decrypted German communiqué to the tune of an infantry army upwards of 100,000. Three armored divisions. Highly mobile. Somehow they also got a hold of the codename— _Sonnenblume_. Sunflower. A strange imagery for the tableau. The geographic division worked on estimations of travel time through the Libyan desert—a fresh set of calculations taking in to account updated photographs of German equipment: light-armored Panzers especially made for desert-travel and heavier Mark IVs tanks to be driven across the Mediterranean coast with air cover. Advance rate is maybe as fast as three hundred miles a day for a whole division—even faster for the Panzers.  
  
The worst of it was figuring out how they were supplying themselves with water and food. It was impossible without native cooperation; who else could have that kind of knowledge? What European could navigate by sight for water in those trackless dunes, or by the feel of their camels, by scent? Maybe Álmasy, according to Col. Bagnold, but who knew who he was working for, or where he was, or even if he was even alive.  
  
—  
  
Remus sometimes thought of them: those Edwardian explorers who went into the desert on their biplanes looking oases, for vanished cities where no living cities would do. They found mountains and ruins. Things to mark down for the privilege of a name. For the lacunae in their maps. For the Royal Geographic. They returned with a sea of glass in the desert, with weathered rocks in the shapes of clouds. They found water-wells that have been in there since first the erosive sand spread through North Africa, before the Pyramids, before Aeneas left Dido in tears and she swore his demise, before the Celtic isles were first set sight upon by Caesar’s centurions— _Britania_ , that savage land. This is more or less how it works. A conqueror, Roman or English, steps onto the tip of the continent, an island in the ocean, or the heart of a desert, and its name changes, its meaning changes. In his actions he casts himself as protagonist in the story of all of man; a map gets made. Lands shift. Boundaries expand. He comes home victorious, and presents his maps in an atlas: Here are the _Paradisaeida_ named after the princes of Europe. Here is the Lake of Queen Victoria found by tracing the cataracts of the Nile. Here are some islets of the savages; here is Egypt, China, India. History is in every map.  
  
And the explorers—those hatted and ruthless men of the wilderness—had all died or else retired home. Then the War came and took all the maps. Knowledge, it turned out, could be requisitioned just like every bit of farmland. Statisticians now sat in RAF Medmenham to work on their theories of probability: replace cows with bombs; subdivide your maps in the usual cylindrical projection; model airstrike hits as a Poisson distribution; model the German army as a fluid transport problem. Repeat. Geographers like him assembled their maps for the War—of the War. They christened battles and orchestrated their shapes. Geography, like mathematics, became the director of death.  
  
No knowledge was innocent.  
  
—  
  
By the end of spring the Germans were stopped at Halfaya Pass, and the 4th Indian Division was able to turn the tide of battle. The frontline ebbed and flowed between the Egyptian border and Tobruk, until finally Rommel was pushed all the way back to western Libya.  
  
—  
  
“Did I tell you that they got James?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Yes. His mum wrote to me after getting all my forwarded letters. Shot down somewhere in France. Some hush-hush work, they say.”  
  
“Sirius—”  
  
“It’s so fucking bloody, Remus. What are we doing here? In Egypt, for fuck’s sake. You know their house was bombed last spring? Total War—what shit.”  
  
Total War: the extension of belligerence toward the civilian population. As if there had been any other kind of war; as if there was some ancient, Edenic past when wars were chess-matches, bloodless and un-Total. An invention of the State whose movements are filled out with flesh.  
  
—  
  
Remus would leave his southern window open so he could hear the muezzin’s echoing calls. It calmed him—the resonance in it, the consoling repetition of those limpid syllables: _Allahu akbar_ …there is no god but God. There is no god but God.  
  
One morning Remus woke with a strange premonition of rain. He had been dreaming, a fragment of childhood memory, of London evenings in the winter fog blending with immovable song of the _adhan_. Sirius was at his side. He was sweating in his sleep. You could feel the fine heat of it, from his skull, his neck, his sloping shoulder. The gentle gradients of his body, a mixture of youth and age, skin and hair—his back, almost blue in the rare mornings when they woke next to each other.  
  
It reminded Remus of England, where shadows were a downy blue in the countryside evenings, when a beloved mist fell on the rolling hills and a lone milkcow lowed on its slow trek home. Memories of Cambridge, of boyhood. Memories of rain. He buried his face in Sirius’s back, and threaded his arm over his flank. Why was hurt so easy and faith so wild and untamed? Remus could feel the fuzzy hairs at Sirius’s stomach, the wirier hairs of his chest. Their bodies like the earth, full of moraines and loess, full of waters and dearth.  
  
The fatality rate for a flying mission is one in ten. Sirius did not wake. Remus closed his eyes.  
  
Where really was the War? And what did it really require of him, of the prescient and scrupulous powers of his maps? Was it already here in Cairo, though food and cigarettes and coffee were still in abundance, though no shadow of the Luftwaffe dipped their steel wings into their desert-airs, no fulgurant bombs came crashing on their doorstep in the dead of night?  
  
—  
  
As a rule, they did not talk about the War. Sirius would not name the men in his squadron and Remus said nothing of his work. But the War showed up in the silence—as a cavity in the meaning, an unmarked mountain-point or an unnamed trench. It showed up in other guises, wearing other names—multi-lingually hidden among the warplanes and burned-out cities in Arabic and German and English. Its true name was still uncatalogued in the lexicon of cartography: here is World War Two: location and features unknown. Find it in the rusted chasses at the bottom of the English Channel. Find it in the darksome heart of the desert.  
  
So instead they talked of the desert. Sirius talked about it in a half-dream, wildly, with a kind of painless love. “You can find every single color in the desert if you look for it.” His hand moved through the air, gesturing out the best conditions for flight, smooth skies and a steady, laminar wind. “The sky is this acid blue. You find everything else in the earth. Purples and yellows and even green.” They had just met up in the morning and spent the afternoon heat in a secluded alcove in the Ezbekieh Gardens. “I wish I could show it to you. I think the desert is the only place where I’ve found green—real green, the most emerald, pure green. Hidden inside the red mountains—this huge swath of green. The desert’s not just this flat thing they always think it is. Well, of course you know. But Remus, you’ve never seen it from above—not just in photographs, but full of color and movement, with your own eyes.”  
  
It was a Sunday. The All Saints Cathedral just let out for mass, not two blocks away. A few flamingoes waded across the willow pond, their necks bent in a redolent S. Fragrant tobacco smoke curled into the air. Sirius did not continue—for they both knew that the desert was just another name for the War. Remus wanted to reach out and touch his hand.  
  
—  
  
By the end of 1941, the Royal Navy, which had been intercepting German and Italian supply convoys from Europe to Africa, suffered crippling blows to its Mediterranean fleet by U boats. German and Italian fleets now controlled the sea and Afrika Korps finally received the reinforcements and replacement tanks it sorely needed. Rommel advanced again.  
  
  
  
  
  
IV. **1942**  
  
BBC Bulletin: Today the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, condemned the mass execution of Jews by Germans in occupied Europe, calling it a “bestial policy”. He asked for a one-minute moment of silence in sympathy for the victims. The Chief Rabbi Dr J H Hertz called on all Jews to commemorate “the numberless victims of the Satanic carnage”. Remus imagined his father, the consummate anglicized Jew—what he would have said if he were still alive, “Britain must not fall—it’s the last hope for Jews in Europe.” A month later his Majesty’s government announced its declination to take in Jewish refugees.  
  
—  
  
You could tell Sirius was a pilot just by his face—by the narrow projective outline of his pilot’s headgears, a negative-shadow, pale next to the exposed, sunburnt skin. For the purposes of security Remus was not allowed to keep a journal—and especially not a sketchbook. So he remembered Sirius’s face, with names culled from the features of a map: valley and arête, bight and isthmus, the tanline a border between two warring nations. After all, what is a nation, a state, a people? Tanlines in the earth—shifting dunes in the mind.  
  
But where to reconstruct the other information, the ecstasy of his limbs, the warmth of his hands, the brightness of his voice? The flux of the organism. One night they broke open a bottle of muscatel Sirius had pinched from an officer’s function, had all of it in one sitting at a cafe on the river, grew more and more impatient, drunk, and cabbed home stumbling. Remus held Sirius’s face in his hands, his careful longing washed by alcohol. There are a set of words you exchange with your lover on leave, whose face you wish for in the painted tenebrism of night, a flicker in the ruin, while the window is closed and the bed is cold with yourself. These words are not plaintive or solemn, not confessional. They are sturdy. You drop them like stones into the pond.  
  
—  
  
Sirius got precious few days-off every month, and returned to Cairo without speaking about what he did out there; it seemed that he returned to sleep, and bathe, and sleep, to ward off War and sand and dreams of death by fire, death by falling. He wrote to Remus and showed up late in the day in a cab down from Gezira and they fucked in Remus’s small flat. From his window you could see above the sienna cityscape of Old Cairo, colonnaded by minarets and the ubiquitous Egyptian palm—while the promise of a breeze drifted downwind, the shivering river glinted in the distance, and hawks wheeled ever higher over the air thermals. _The widening gyre._  
  
The heat defeated them. They could not move without its nausea. They waited for night to come and touched each other in the falling twilight. Afterwards they fed each other dates bought from a shop down the street. Sirius tore the flesh with his long fingers, along the soft lines of its fiber— _dactylifera_ , an etymological joke—and Remus kissed them, the knuckles, the wrinkles and calluses smelling like vinegared honey. Their sweetness was like the sweetness of whiskey.  
  
At the beginning of General Auchinleck’s scrambling retreat Remus asked Sirius what he’d seen in Libya—“It’s a lot of waiting,” Sirius said, chewing on a gumdrop, one of the last out of an old tin he’d gotten from his brother, almost a year ago now. “A lot of waiting.” He repeated. “You know how it is—anti-recon missions. Sometimes gunfire if I’m covering ground movement.” What did you do the rest of the time? “We would do nothing.”  
  
Nothing. The desert; the Great Sand Sea; the calm waters at Matruh like velvet. Remus did not want to know, in a way, what was being done out there, between the outposts of the War, between the ventifacts and dunes and eolian desert varnish, beneath the shadowy dread of bomber-planes, beneath the aegis of the most Civilized Nations on Earth. Cities burn as easily as forests. People burn as easily as paper. Where was Sirius in this equation of death, at the beginning or the end, the left hand side or right? Where was himself? He thought of the topo maps he would prepare for the model-builders down in Heliopolis; the detailed and careful reconstructions of Benghazi, Tobruk, Fuka, in neat progression down the coastline, next is Alexandria, next is Cairo. There was a story of an explorer lost in the Sahara, finally groping his way through its wastes only to find the undrinkable sea. Rarely did Remus feel the full extent of time—the immovable, maddening strength of its grip, its inexorable gait—as he did then, when all that stood between them and Rommel fell one by one, and Sirius could not speak of it, the fear like a sickness in your limbs, in your heart.  
  
Sirius was asleep. The setting sun gleamed on the window and cast its prismatic specter over the walls, prophetic, enchanted, as if through its diffractive metamorphosis it could distill into a single color, an unknown color, the most voluptuous, perfect color.  
  
—  
  
Benghazi was _blitzed_ and briefly sieged before falling to Rommel’s second advance. The Eighth Army retreated along the Cyrenican coast until Tobruk, only a few weeks after they had first driven out the Germans. With the loss of naval control from Malta, if Tobruk was to be sieged again, there would be no re-supply via water.  
  
In the early morning on June 13 of 1942, half of operational aircrafts from Squadron 14 were deployed from their airbase at Ismailia to support the Indian division defending dug-out boxes at El Adem near Tobruk from advancing Italo-German columns. The siege of Tobruk had gone on for two weeks now. They took off some time before sunrise, but when they neared their target, visibility dropped precipitously due to an unexpected surge of sirocco winds; the squadron broke formation and a few fighters were forced northward, crossing the line-of-fire of an Italian anti-aircraft brigade. Flight Lieutenant S O Black lost radio contact with operational home base at RAF Mersa Metruh in the early afternoon. In one more week the Eighth Army retreated. Tobruk fell.  
  
—  
  
On the evening of June 30, the evening edition of _Egyptian Daily_ reported the sudden departure of half of the Royal Navy fleet stationed in Alexandria. The later bulletin from the BBC stated that the German advance had reached El Alamein, just 100 miles from Alexandria; German success was likely due to superior firepower and equipment; the retreating Eighth Army joined by the Australian division garrisoned at the small, unfortified railway station was unlikely to hold the German assault. They called the ongoing fight at El Alamein the Battle for Egypt. That night all the train stations and major roadways were flooded with the populace fleeting the city. Europeans boarded trains to Palestine in droves—with their family and possessions in tow. The local Jews, knowing full well their fate if Egypt fell to Hitler, sold pretty much everything they owned.  
  
When Remus went to work the next day, he found, to his surprise, GHQ in state of conspiratorial frenzy. All the basement incinerators were full up. Dustbins had been turned into makeshift bonfires. “Find these and burn them,” Air Commodor Gauzman said, and started handing Remus directories of works produced or cataloged by their office. Most of these Remus had worked on or oversaw, classified Secret if not Most Secret—enemy movement maps, suspected camps and stations, geology reports, both along the coast and in the deep desert.  
  
And so he burned them, on the roof of the building, overlooking the Semiramis Hotel. Smoke from all around GHQ blackened the sky. Ash drifted into his eyes, paper-flakes, burnt snow. The city roiled—traffic jammed the streets in an unbearable din. So this is it, Remus thought. This is what all has come to. When Rommel gets here what will it be for me, a _kriegsgefangener_ or the concentration camps? What is the blackness at the heart of these maps—their lignin-yellow pages, their ineffable capacity for memory, for disinheritance, for history? The maps curled under the flames as if they were in pain. Continents warped and bent in the heat, shorelines fused, and oceans spilled into shapelessness. There was nothing more beautiful than the burning of paper, Remus thought, the revulsion of fire, the un-knowledge, the liberation.  
  
That day they called Ash Wednesday. But El Alamein stood; the Eighth Army held the garrison; Cairo was safe. When the smoke cleared, and the presses were printing again, a newsletter of recent troop casualties landed on Remus’s desk: BLACK, S O     FLT LT     SQN 14 — MIA.  
  
  
  
  
  
V. **1943**  
  
On his way down to the morning market he passes by the Empire Services Club motorcars that leave for half-day tours of the nearby sights, and everyday a few dozen soldiers on leave wait beneath the shade for a car ride out to the Pyramids, or the Valley of the Kings. Before the War it was the society people who did this, not the lower-class soldiers of the Empire—a few second sons of earls and adventurous women, flown into Cairo and immediately garbing themselves in the uniforms of a safari; what did they see, as they drove in land rovers or private planes into the Great Desert? Remus has been through all the records of the Royal Geographical. He remembers the reports, the film negatives of dunes and ruins dotting the bare maps of the Sahara, oases, waterholes, promise of life within its uninhabitability: the fractured hypostyle of Karnak; empty tombs of the Middle Kingdom; caves where they found painted swimmers deep in the desert, still merrily gliding into the vanished ocean millennia later, in the xeric heat; the dense and coral necropolis of the ancient dead whose cartels of spirit and meaning have already been hijacked by the hallucinatory vocabularies of last century’s egyptologists. What parts of all that will the tourists—service men and attachés of the Allied nations—in their uniforms and pant-suits, their roughness and mild apathy, ever get to see? The stones of the Great Pyramids littered with soldier’s names. The chin of the Sphinx propped up with scaffolds. Egypt under siege—not just by the Germans, or the philistine conflagration of the bombs, but by the grasping arms of Empire—excavated and promptly renamed, _ex situ_ , curated to sit in the British Museum alongside the Rosetta Stone with its triple inscriptions of “Ptolmes”, key to an Empire. All scattered now, delocalized, diffused—in the shadowy collections of half a dozen world governments or societies or private hands, with what remains too large and unwieldy to be carted off, but never to be gathered again.  
  
It used to be that the smell of spice was everywhere, of cumin and cardamom being carried through the alleyways on carts, olives from the Palestine, baskets of indigo from India, but now you only catch a ghost of it, walking down the narrow, half-covered streets of Masr al-Qadima, along the boarded-up vending stalls, a stab of sweetness in the smell the motor oil and donkey shit that left you reeling in memory of the perfume of the recent past.  
  
When first he had come to Cairo, the bazaars mesmerized him. They were a profusion for the senses—foods and spices he's never smelled or tasted, dazzling vessels of beaten metal, birds whose plumes were the colors of a society lady’s dress; the incorrigible pulse of barter and trade. It contrasted with the sterile clicks of the stock ticker tapes he’d seen in his uncle’s London club, when his uncle Isaac had deemed it proper to coach his brother’s son in the way of the world before categorizing Remus as wholly unsuitable for “real man’s work”— _too much of a dreamer_. The awfulness of it—the press of men and the din of their shouting at the Exchange. Remus wonders if they still went on like that, even when London is being obliterated little by little by the Luftwaffe, shouting over the symphonic roar of a distant detonation their bids for buys and sells for their collective future. Maybe—he would not be surprised—maybe they’ve even moved shop, down underground as all other institutions have done, the first truly subterranean market.  
  
Remus would eventually realize, surveying day-in and day-out from his birds-eye-view perch above the tactical maps of Egypt and Palestine, that the Market is the real War. The war of wages and spice, the war of leveraging hunger, the war for the means of production and access to the Canal, the war declared by one denominational currency on another, Mark against Pound, the dueling fluvial movement of human capital through the invisible hands the of merchant-class, the supply chains of wheat and cotton, the stable exchange of goods for futures, futures for guns, guns for butter, butter for oil. Guns for oil. Olives for oil. All for oil.  
  
Before the War there were geologists who went out to Palestine and dug for oil the same way explorers of the last century dug for ruins. The principle of it is the same. Pick your favorite spot and dig until you find some stratum or sub-stratum with indications of your desired timeline, then widen your search until you strike gold—that infinitesimal but recoverable layer of the residuum of the ancient dead. They called it sweet crude. The prospectors would take a vial and taste it, the tar, the black blood of the Empire. Was it really sweet? Did it really give off a ghost of fragrant loveliness, soft and ambrosial? Would you taste the crustaceous and kerogenous life, bred through aeons of earthen, mortal time? Remus rather thinks that if you dip your tongue on it you can taste them all: whirring engines of downed Spitfires spilling into the Channel; incendiary kerosene of Burmese jungleside scorch-earth policies; jerrycans of petrol buried in sand dunes for lines of retreat; tankers trickling fuel in Newcastle shipyards; a motorcar left running in some countryside estate in the English midlands. The black blood that used to be of slaves’, now of eternal, magical petroleum. If the War is the Market, if the Market is oil, if oil is death—it all comes to a neat circle.  
  
—  
  
Pilots don’t die. They are lost. They fall out of the sky. They fall into the desert. They fall into the sea. Their names become obscured by the imperturbable silence of nature, missing in action, as if there is still a distraught search party somewhere, prying their torch-lights into the primeval dark. Before Ash Wednesday, among the collection of maps at the Cairo RAF Intelligence office, there used to be a section that dealt with the geography of the Cyrenaican coast—its patterns of foliage and oases, its varying types of sand-terrain, the jagged skeletons of its steppes grading into the hollow desert. They had no maps of the sky.  
  
—  
  
On Friday evenings from the high windows of the Sha'ar Hashamayim synagogue he can hear the sounds of Shabbat: the synchrony of singing, soft prayers, voices quiet with the murmur of communality. It would be Rosh Hashanah in a few weeks. “Remus, my boy,” his father had said, in front of the sitting room fire. “You’re a Jew no matter how much an atheist you think you are.” Remus lights another cigarette.  
  
—  
  
The closest city to the sea from Cairo is Alexandria—just two hour’s train ride. From there a cab ride takes you up to the Pharos, a narrow promontory jutting into the water, where a lighthouse stands, a huge round structure in a dull clay yellow, peering round and round into the Mediterranean. Mind you, every Englishman will be quick to comment, it’s not the Lighthouse. You see, in Egypt, the past blinds the present. For the English imagination there is no Egypt for the Arabs, no Egypt for the Muslims. They step off the Aerodrome and see in the streets of Cairo the decayed temples of Horus and Pharaohs, not the cities of Caliphs and Pashas, not the city of the Wafd and the revolutionaries. What had Yeats said, standing at the end of the last War, peering through some immortal veil— _things fall apart; the center cannot hold_.  
  
—  
  
Go south enough from downtown Cairo, towards the refugee camps, towards those glinting, implacable Pyramids, the children of the _fellahin_ start to gather around you, full of puppyish curiosity and daring. _Please_ , they say in their mimicked English, _please, sir_. They extend their hands. Remus reserves a few pennies everyday for them and they run away squealing in delight. But in the end, when the War is over, when the convoys land home, when the planes take off one last time, where would _they_ go, these children of the War? The Egyptians who grew up in its belly, who grew up with the War’s language, its system of logic, weight with its values, deploying its elaborate metaphors of belligerence, defeat, cowardice; (no, not just Egyptians, but Italians, French, German, _English_ ); what maps would _they_ draw to delineate the ruin from the pasture, the enemy from the ally, the reality from the delusion?  
  
Remus sits in his room at night. He turns on the radio and scans for the German station. You can always count on Radio Beograd to play Lale Andersen’s “Lili Marleen”—not without irony, for the Nazis had put her in house arrest for her vociferous support of the Jews. Sirius used to sing it in his wavering voice, in rare moments of unguarded pleasure, when they were alone. It was the favorite song of all his garrison. They hummed it at mess, at their exercises, at night, in ad-libbed German and made up words:  
  
_Aus dem stillen Raume_  
_Aus der Erde Grund_  
_Hebt mich wie im Träume_  
_dein verliebter Mund._  
  
_Wenn sich die späten Nebel drehn_  
_Werd' ich bei der Laterne stehn_  
_Wie einst Lili Marleen,_  
_Wie einst Lili Marleen._  
  
There are so many songs. Songs of love. Songs of loss. Songs of privation. War-songs. Peace-songs. Turn the dial and the music skitters into another frequency—another life—  
  
All Remus can think of is whether it would have been the same had they met back in London or Cambridge or—hell, even the cindering fields of northern France. Would they have pierced one another’s disguises, between the stately courtyards and placid townhouses of the University, or in the teeming street of London, to find that shimmering vein of recognition beneath the silent incognito of their lives. Whether Egypt too, was formulated in their love—Mersa Matruh with trackless sands and indomitable horizon, Cairo with its shifting, narrow streets, and the warm velvet waters of the Mediterranean, as supple as the sky—a love bred of and dependent on the grainy North African war-air, its high parts per million of acrid shell-fire, of crumbling bricolage, of army-numbness and army-action, of bombs, of death, of death.  
  
Where is the War tonight?  
  
The moon hangs over the glittering streets—just like it did that other full-mooned night, over the Ezbekieh Gardens, over that flash of light from Sirius Black’s cufflinks, a jewel of desire no less resplendent than the numinous light of memory. Surely it hangs over all the cities, now, in their varied states of darkness and illumination—London, Rome, Lahore—a skin of light on the warm Mediterranean surface, shimmering with the tenderness of young lovers, limpid and eternal. But even the moon can break your heart.  
  
  
  
  
-finis.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be. What are we doing in Africa, in Italy? What is Kip doing dismantling bombs in orchards, for God’s sake? What is he doing fighting English wars?”  
  
- _The English Patient_ , by Michael Ondaatje  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I relied pretty heavily on Artemis Cooper’s excellent _Cairo in the War: 1939-1945_ , which provided an on-the-ground, British perspective of Cairo’s role in the War.
> 
> 2\. BBC’s archive of oral histories about WW2: a really great resource for perspectives of war from the people who were in it. Three stories were especially helpful:  
>     -[Private Dudley Cave](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/36/a2688636.shtml), on being a gay soldier in the British Army  
>     -[Douglas John Pike](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/73/a6961773.shtml), on the Flap  
>     -[Douglas Renwick](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/81/a4984581.shtml), on Cairo nightlife
> 
> 3\. I apologize that the time-line of the BBC bulletins in response to news of the ongoing Holocaust of the European Jewry are not exact (they occur about a year earlier in the story than in reality):  
>     -<http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/17/newsid_3547000/3547151.stm>  
>     -<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/UK/forsec0243a.html>
> 
> 4\. The idea for a love story set in North Africa between two soldiers came from [a letter](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2013/02/sleep-well-my-love.html) reprinted in ONE magazine from Brian Keith to his lover
> 
> 5\. Two songs are featured in this story.  
>     -Josephine Baker’s [solo number](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KlUGxlgEPU) from her film [Zouzou](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026023/)  
>     -Lale Andersen’s arrangement of “[Lili Marlene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4qe0Hp6RU)”, which has [a fascinating story](http://lrdg.hegewisch.net/lrdglilimarlene.html) during WWII
> 
> 6\. Squadron 39 were not supplied with Martin Marauders until 1943 but I could not resist; details of the June 13 battle are an amalgam of the battle of El Adem and an earlier battle at Bir Hakeim
> 
> 7\. Climbing on building exteriors is nowadays called buildering, a fond combination of bouldering and building. There is [a fascinating account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Climbers_of_Cambridge) (with pictures!) of a group of students climbing the buildings of Cambridge in 1936, republished recently
> 
> 8\. Historical geography and details about troop life was also found in the following reproduction of a [WW2 Cairo guidebook](http://www.warlinks.com/cairo/cairo.shtml)
> 
> 9.  Artistic inspiration from Michael Ondaatje’s _The English Patient_ and Thomas Pynchon’s _Gravity’s Rainbow_.


End file.
